


Falling in Slow Motion

by orichan



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Absent Parents, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Ben Solo Pain Train, Boarding School, Bullying, Childhood, Childhood Trauma, Depression, Disappointment, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Father-Son Relationship, Fear, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions, Lack of Communication, Loneliness, Miscommunication, Mother-Son Relationship, Nightmares, Non-Linear Narrative, Parent-Child Relationship, Regret, Young Ben Solo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-11-21
Packaged: 2020-10-17 06:17:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20616365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orichan/pseuds/orichan
Summary: “If you were the product of two people, two very strong personalities who seemed to be almost more committed to a cause than anything else, what’s that like?”For a young Ben Solo, it was a perpetual nightmare of falling into an abyss while simultaneously turning into a monster like one of the cursed princes in his mother’s stories.And no one, and everyone, was at fault.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A Ben Solo pain-train written for the 2019 Reylo Fan Fiction Anthology with “nightmares” as the central theme.
> 
> This story is set before TROS. Bring a box of tissues or two or four. You have been warned.
> 
> Written before Rise of Kylo Ren - it was canon compliant before that popped up

Ben didn’t remember much of anything before he turned five, other than vague snippets of droids that babysat him while his mother attended to her Senatorial duties and his father was off on another one of his adventures. He rarely questioned why he had so few childhood memories. When he did, he would rationalize that it was probably because he had no one to fondly reminisce with. After all, wasn’t that how childhood memories worked? Wisps of memories solidified by stories told by loving friends and during family reunions? 

_ “Remember the time when you refused to leave the house unless you were wrapped in Uncle Lando’s cape?” _

_ “Remember when you wouldn’t stop crying unless Uncle Chewie carried you back and forth in the room while your mother was away?” _

_ “Remember when you wouldn’t go to bed unless C-3PO told you the story of how the Ewoks saved the princess?” _

(Ben would eventually see recordings of the above incidents when he “disassembled” one of his mother’s protocol droids in a fit of rage as a teenager. But by then, there weren’t any childhood memories left in him to reinforce, and they became simply another reason why he was so angry at the universe.) 

The truth was, his parents never reminisced, or at least not in front of him. Growing up, Ben sometimes wondered if it was because they weren’t home often enough to recount anything, or because they could barely hold a conversation with each other without it leading to an argument. 

_ Or maybe, he found himself thinking later, it was because they didn’t like to talk about a time when they still had hope for their son. _

* * *

Kylo Ren felt _ her _ before he saw her in his peripheral. 

Not quite as clearly as he could when Snoke was alive, but she was still there, like an itch he couldn’t scratch. For a brief moment, he allowed himself wonder if he was the same to her. 

She wouldn’t look at him, hadn’t looked at him since she looked down from the Millenium Falcon door ten months ago, but he knew she felt his presence all the same. She tensed for the briefest of moments when the Force connected them before she caught herself.

She wasn’t alone this time, not a difficult deduction, because she rolled her eyes and snorted at an unseen companion on her right. “Sure, whatever you say.” 

He dug his nails into his palm until they left angry crescent moons on his flesh. He didn’t let himself think about why when his throat tightened at her easy composure, or at the way she nodded and smiled so brilliantly at whoever she was with. Yet, he couldn’t deny his pleasure when she excused herself shortly after. 

He waited until he was sure she was alone before he spoke. “You have gotten good at telling those lies.” And she had, she didn’t even blink when she told her companion she needed to get her gears ready for tomorrow. 

Her hands clenched into fists at her side, the only evidence she heard him. 

Sometimes he wondered if this was what it felt to talk to air. Sometimes he wondered if this was what it felt like to be trapped in a dream. Most of the time he wondered if this was what it felt like to be mad. 

He knew she wouldn’t answer, but he found himself asking the question anyway: “Have you told them about this?” 

_ Have you told them about when you still had hope in me? _

Like always, there was only long suffering silence.

* * *

Ben had never been a restful sleeper but he was five when the nightmares began. 

He woke up, screaming, tears trailing down his sweat-laden face. He didn’t quite remember the details of the dream, except that it was dark and terrifying and he was alone.

He remembered his parents running through the door at his cries.

“Ben?” The alarm in their collective voices only made Ben cry harder. 

His father turned on the light, blaster drawn; his mother sat quickly at Ben’s side, frantic. 

“What’s wrong, Ben? What’s wrong?” She only calmed when she checked him over twice and saw that nothing was amiss. “He had a nightmare,” his mother finally concluded, looking at his father.

“Looks like it,” his father observed, and put his gun back into its holster. He bent down and picked his son up. And finally—_ finally _—Ben’s sobs abated. “Come on, big guy, you can sleep with us.” 

(“It’s my fault,” Leia told Luke, a few days after she heard the most devastating news in her life. It was clear from the bags under her eyes that she had not slept since the news. “Ben had those nightmares. It must had been Snoke, he had been targeting him since he was—”

“It’s not your fault,” Luke told her. 

Leia shook her head. “If I’d made the connection earlier, maybe I could have done something about this, maybe...”)

* * *

During rare peaceful interludes, when his mother had time to personally put him to bed, she would tell him stories. Her stories were based on all the stories she had heard when she was a child, like the ones about the princess and the Antarian pea, or the prince who cried dark wolf, or the princess and the beast. Ben liked the last one the best because it had exciting battles. 

The story changed with each telling, sometimes the beast turned good, sometimes the beast turned bad, sometimes the beast became a prince again and lived happily ever after, but the story always began like this: _ Once upon a time, there was a prince who was turned into a monster by an evil Sith lord’s curse… _

* * *

“I know everything I need to know about you,” the girl snapped at Kylo Ren. 

“You do?” It was a rhetorical question. “Ah, you do.” She was looking at him with the same blazing hatred as she did when she struck him in the forest. She already heard from the traitor about what he did to the village, she witnessed him killing his own father. What more was there to know? “You have that look in your eyes. From the forest. When you called me a monster.”

“You are a monster.”

For a fleeting moment, Kylo's mind flickered to the heartless monsters in the stories his mother used to tell. That’s who he was now, wasn’t he? He stepped forward. “Yes, I am.”

* * *

The stories his father liked to tell him were much different than his mother’s. 

Gone were the righteous princes and princesses fighting for justice, instead they were mostly about epic space battles smugglers got into while working their latest job. In his stories, the smugglers always completed impossible maneuvers in their spacecrafts as they flew away from the grasp of the latest rich but unsavory character they had just stolen from—smug and victorious. 

If Leia had heard those colorful stories with her five year old son, she might have disapproved, but she wasn’t there, and Ben thoroughly enjoyed them. 

“I want to be a smuggler,” Ben told his father one night, clutching his father’s dice in his hand after another story about past ventures. 

His father laughed and ruffled his hair. “We don’t need to smuggle anything anymore, how about you be a pilot like me and keep the New Republic safe instead?”

Ben considered his words for a moment and frowned. “Will I still get to fly The Millennium Falcon like you did if I become a pilot?” 

His father grinned. “That and V-Wing, and X-Wing and whatever other Wings that come in the future.”

Ben’s face lit up at the possibility.

(Han often thought back to this moment with his son when he saw the nervous but excited faces of yet another crop of young pilots and felt his stomach drop.)

“I want to be a pilot, just like you,” Ben declared, the smile on his hopeful lips brighter than a supernova. 

“You will, kiddo. When you are old enough, I will teach you myself, I promise.”

(If there was one promise Han wished he kept, it was his promise to teach his son how to fly.)

* * *

The nightmares kept coming. 

Twisted, smoky tentacles would reach for Ben from the blackest pits. Sometimes he would be all alone, his parents nowhere to be seen. Worse though, was when his parents were there and saw him, only to turn their backs and abandon him. Either way, the tentacles would eventually grab and drag him into the pit. The pit wasn’t filled with water, but a black substance that oozed like lava. When he fell, darkness engulfed him until it entered his lungs and drowned him. 

Ben wasn’t aware that his mother’s concern over his repeated nightmares went beyond his lost sleep or the possibility that the dreams could be the manifestation of something more sinister. To him, the nightmares were merely the nature of things. Nothing more. Nothing less. But the dreams did make him deathly afraid of the dark, and they made him panic every time his father and mother stepped out the door without him. 

“I’ll be back before you know it, kiddo,” his father would say, giving one last pat on his back. 

“I’ll miss you too, Ben. Be a good boy while I’m gone,” his mother would console him as she kissed him on his forehead.

(Years later, when Leia heard reports of how Kylo Ren mercilessly destroyed another village, she wondered what would have happened if her younger self let everything else go and gave her frightened boy the attention and assurance he needed instead. Could she have prevented the birth of Kylo Ren? Would the universe be a better place? Would her son still be by her side?)

“Please, don’t go,” he begged them, holding their hands just a little tighter with each parting. 

But the universe needed saving, and the good of the universe outweighed the neediness of an irrationally scared child, so over and over, Han and Leia would shake loose their son’s hand.

* * *

Kylo Ren’s hand barely grazed her face and instantly his surrounding shifted to a desert and he was suddenly staring at a child, the scavenger when she was younger. 

“Come back!” she cried, her face scrunched up in distress as a ship flew away. He knew instinctively that the ship carried her parents; that they were abandoning her to a stranger in a strange place, and— suddenly, he wasn’t just seeing the scavenger anymore, he was also seeing himself.

He saw a pitiable boy, crying as his parents inevitably took leave. 

Kylo let out a shaky breath.

* * *

It would be a lie to say Ben was a horrid child. He wasn’t. Aside from the nightmares and his aversion to separation, Ben was a relatively easy-going child. He wasn’t a picky eater, he was generally well-behaved, and he could even sit through long formal functions when required. He was bright too. He could name every component in a hyperdrive, he could read by the age of five, and he was fluent in Basic, Shyriiwook, and Droidspeak all before the age of six. 

Han used to half-joke, half-brag to anyone who would listen that Ben was so smart he would have questioned his parentage if he wasn’t so obsessed with spaceships. 

And Ben was obsessed with spaceships.

He had an enormous appetite for anything spaceship related. He would read anything: books, articles, holo-ads, anything that mentioned ships. He would spend hours drawing schematics of the insides of make-believe crafts, and played make-believe battles with his toy X-Wings. Every conversation somehow led back to spaceships or flying or both. Nothing else held his interest—which was fine when he was interacting with protocol droids since droids naturally tailored themselves to a human’s interests, but with other children… 

At a rare playdate, the children began to cut Ben off after he interjected for the fourth time with a random starfighter fact. 

From afar Leia watched and winced.

“We should enroll him in school.”

Han sighed. It was not the first time Leia brought up the idea of sending Ben to some school with the other sheltered children of senators and diplomats. “He has his whole life ahead of him to learn to make friends,” he told her with a shrug, not understanding her concern, just as he didn’t understand her desire to send their son to school at such a young age. 

“He will be able to interact with more children his own age if he goes to school,” Leia insisted. 

“He will learn more by traveling the galaxy.”

Leia rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “He is six and a half, Han. He can’t go anywhere without us, and neither of us can just randomly travel the galaxy anymore.” 

Han rolled his eyes at her. “I can do whatever I please, Your Highness,” he snapped, the beginning of yet another heated argument.

(In the end, Han didn’t do what he pleased, nor did he ever travel the galaxy with Ben. In reality, as much as he would like to pretend otherwise, he cared too much for the New Republic to forsake his responsibilities. In reality, Han never had a father, so he never quite trusted his own instincts when it came to Ben.

He rarely let himself wonder what could have been, but on one whisky filled night after his son had stopped speaking with him, he wondered what could have been had he trusted his instincts and traveled the galaxy with his son instead.)

* * *

Ben was seven when his parents enrolled him in school. 

A hush settled over the busy manicured yard in front of an imposing white building as Ben stepped past the gate between Leia and Han. Ben instinctively shifted closer to his mother. A balding man in a brown robe stepped quickly forward. He had obviously been expecting them.

“Senator Organa and General Solo,” the man greeted with the familiar deference Ben had heard from strangers that sometimes walked up to his parents on the street. “I welcome you to the Lumcet New Republic School.” 

“Headmaster Karthiar, it’s very kind of you to greet us personally,” said his mother as his father settled for a silent nod. His father was never one for empty pleasantries. 

Ben ignored the boring adult conversation and looked around, taking in his new surroundings. There were more children here than he had seen before in his life, but no one he recognized. There were a few adults too, all in robes similar to the headmaster. They—the children very obviously, the adults more subtly—were looking at him. Some of the children were whispering. He thought he caught one of them pointing. It made Ben feel self-conscious, like maybe something was wrong with him. 

He didn’t want to be here, he decided. He took another step closer to his mother and pulled at her hand. “I want to go home.”

His mother turned to him and smiled the same smile she always had when she was about to leave. It was mid-summer on Chandrila, but Ben suddenly felt cold. 

“You will love school, Ben. You will get to learn so many new things and make so many new friends.” 

He didn’t want friends. He wanted his parents. But he saw the hope in his mother’s eyes and didn’t want to disappoint her so he tried his best to keep his panic at bay. “If I make a friend now, can I go home tonight?” 

“A transporter will bring you home every seven solar cycles.” 

Ben felt his breath seize. They were abandoning him, just like they did in his dreams. 

_ Did he do something wrong? _ He searched his brain for probable causes. Was it the toaster he broke the other week while he was trying to figure out how the heating coil worked? Was it because he didn’t make his bed? Or maybe it was because they were getting tired of being woken up by him every time he had a nightmare? Last time he did that, while they weren’t angry, he knew they were annoyed. 

“I won’t wake you up at night,” he tried to negotiate. “I won’t cry,” he added, but he knew he was already failing at his words because he could feel his throat tightened. 

He could barely see his mother from the blur of tears when she knelt in front of him and pulled him into a hug. “You’re not being punished, Ben.” 

Ben couldn’t shake the feeling that he was. There was no other logical reason why his parents would want to leave him in this place all alone. 

He felt dizzy from how quickly his heart was pounding. He couldn’t help but remember his nightmares, the dark pool, and the way his parents just walked away as the dark tentacles reached for him— 

He turned to his father. “Dad—I don’t want to—please don’t leave me—” 

“Breathe, big guy, breathe.” His father guided him from his shoulder to sit down. “That’s it. In and out. In and out. We are not leaving you.”

Ben finally breathed and noticed that his parents were crowding around him while the headmaster looked on with concern. “So I don’t have to go to school?” he asked hopefully. 

His mother looked on helplessly. His father shot her a sharp, what Ben would later identify as his father’s_ see-I-was-right-and-you-were-wrong _look before sighing. “All big boys go to school, Ben,” his father said. “But you know what else big boys get to do?” He paused and waited until Ben looked him in his eyes.

Then he lowered his voice, the way he always did when he said something he knew Mom wouldn’t quite approve, “They get to ride on the Millennium Falcon.”

* * *

“Why did you hate your father? Give me an honest answer,” the girl demanded, the embarrassment from a moment before seemingly forgotten. “You had a father who loved you, he gave a damn about you.” 

He remembered a feeble child choking on his own words, as the world spun around him. He remembered his parents leaving him to a group of strangers to a place that wasn’t home, and he didn’t know why or what he did wrong to make them do this. He remembered begging his father to stay with him, because he needed him, couldn’t stop needing him. 

It was funny how different and yet similar they were, it was almost as if the universe was playing a cruel joke and made them two halves of a whole. 

It would have been so much simpler if he did hate him. 

He told her the truth: “I don’t hate him.”

* * *

It didn’t take long for the staff at Lumcet New Republic School to realize that Ben didn’t quite fit their expected mental image of Leia Organa and Han Solo’s son. They expected either a charismatic prince or a rebellious charmer, but Ben was neither. A bit sullen, a little awkward, and a touch peculiar with his near endless random facts about spacecrafts, Ben often ended up next to whichever teacher was assigned as supervisor during recess. It was clear that Ben had trouble connecting with children his own age, but it was not yet apparent that he would grow up to be an unsociable outcast or an unstable walking emergency. They shrugged and pushed him back toward the other children. They assumed it was a phase and he would win everyone over in due time. He was his parents’ son, after all. 

Shoulders sagged, Ben turned back and surveyed his options. He could ask Mistress Bate to let him join the game of Limmie, but Ben hated the game. He was lanky and long in a way that was not conducive to grace or coordination, he never managed to score, and being tackled onto the ground hurt. Ben considered joining a group of boys who were playing in an intense card game, some variant of Sabacc. Ben was very good at this, but the boys rarely let him have a turn, and no one ever listened to him when he suggested a better move. Ben ended up making his way to the group playing some sort of imaginary battle against Imperials. It seemed better than the alternatives. They were in the middle of some sort of mock blaster battle, and he didn’t mind watching from the sidelines. It reminded him of his father’s stories, and he liked his father’s stories. 

“—Rebel scums, you are outnumbered, ten to one!” said A’Toba. Ben remembered his name because he was the only Togruta in his class. A’Toba dramatically cackled. Ben had a feeling he volunteered to play the evil Imperial general just for the villainous cackles. 

“Ten to one is more than enough when we have the skills,” said the Abednedo girl whose name Ben didn’t quite remember, except that it started with a T. All he knew of her was that she was friends with Cassi, a popular Mirialan that the other boys in his class had secret crushes on. 

“And the galaxy’s strongest Jedi,” added Maze, a Twi’lek girl and another one of Cassi’s friends, nodding toward Cassi, who was, of course, given the best part.

A’Toba cackled again. “Your Jedi is no match for my Sith.”

Next to him, Kyle, the blond haired golden boy in their class, imitated Darth Vader’s infamous breathing sound. “Yes, they are no match for me,” he said in the deepest voice he could manage. Then he held up the stick in his hand and made a buzzing sound to signify a lightsaber igniting. 

Cassi smirked and lifted her stick like she was holding a lightsaber and made a buzzing sound. “Leave the Sith to me, sisters.”

Ben watched the two sides rush at each other with finger blasters held out. He couldn’t help but side with the Rebels and cheered a little when the “Stormtroopers” started falling on the ground. Maze began chasing after A’Toba, and A’Toba was running away like a coward, just like how his father described Imperials. He turned his attention to Kyle and Cassi’s duel. It was a close match. Kyle was taller and a little stronger than Cassi, but Cassi was better with the stick. Cassi blocked gracefully as Kyle brought down his stick, before spinning away. And…

Cassi suddenly snapped her head his way with a look of disbelief. 

Ben blinked in confusion. He looked around him, trying to look for a logical reason to her attention. There was no one behind him, which meant Cassi was looking at him, but it didn’t make any sense. She was in his class, but they barely interacted. Ben wasn’t even sure if she knew his name. 

Kyle took the opportunity to jab his stick into Cassi’s side. “Distraction is your downfall, Jedi,” he said dramatically. When Cassi barely reacted, he followed her gaze toward Ben with a frown. “Cassi?”

This woke Cassi from her weird trance. She suddenly noticed the stick on her side. She clutched her side like she was really wounded and slid down on one knee. “You bested me this time, Sith, but next time...”

* * *

Ben thought nothing more of the encounter—until Cassi threw herself in the seat next to him in the library the very next day. 

Ben nearly jumped out of his seat. He had been so absorbed in his book about the history of space navigation, he hadn’t noticed anyone approach him. 

Cassi invaded his personal space as she leaned in to get a better view at the book on the table. “This looks hard.” Then, before Ben could stop her she picked the book up and flipped through the pages. She made a face. “There aren’t even pictures,” she commented before putting the book back on the table. 

Ben pulled the book toward him protectively and quickly flipped back to the page he was reading. 

“Oh, sorry,” she said when she saw his reaction. “I just—”

“What do you want?” The question came out harsher than he intended, but Ben didn’t apologize. It wasn’t like any of his classmates had gone out of their way to make him feel welcome in the last few moon cycles. When he tried to share with them something interesting he had learned, they always spoke over him. When they had to pick teams for team work, he was always paired last. 

But Cassi was not deterred. “Miss Mabel told me I might find you here,” she began, casually taking a seat in the chair next to him. “I wanted to talk to you about what I saw yesterday.”

Ben was not comprehending. “What you saw yesterday?”

Cassi turned and stared at him most earnestly. “Are you a Jedi?”

“No.” It was the most ridiculous question ever. Uncle Luke was the Jedi, but he was just Ben. 

“Oh,” said Cassi, she touched her chin with a small frown. “But you made the rocks float.”

_ Rocks float? _Ben had no idea what Cassi was talking about and he didn’t know how to react. 

“Like this, silly,” Cassi said with a giggle as if she was reading his mind. She reached out a hand and suddenly his book flew away from him and into her hand. 

He should be impressed, after all, while he had heard all about Uncle Luke’s great Jedi power, he had never seen the Force in action in real life before, but at that moment, his mind was purely focused on the fact that someone had stolen his book. His had reached out of hand by reflex. “Hey! That’s my—”

An unexpected warmth grew in the middle of in his palm and suddenly the book left Cassi’s hand and floated back. 

“You didn’t even realize you were doing it!” Cassi deduced in amazement.

Ben watched the book in shock. His heart fluttered at the sight in disbelief. This was the Force. The same Force his mother talked about in her stories. The same Force his Uncle Luke used to save the world. Ben felt the pull of the Force for the first time.

* * *

It took exactly two sets before Kylo Ren was fully convinced, but the familiar footwork and saber swing combo was such damning evidence that he couldn’t deny the fact any longer. The girl was pulling his skills, even though she wasn’t probing his mind. He knew this because he knew exactly what having his mind probed felt like after so many years of being Luke’s and Snoke’s apprentices. 

No, this was something else. This was something new.

His lightsaber glowed purple near where it clashed with hers. Ben could barely feel the pain from his wounds or the cold from the snow, all he could feel was the pull of something he couldn’t quite place. Maybe it was the Force, or maybe it was fate. 

He didn’t want to fight her. There must be another way.

“You need a teacher. I’ll show you the ways of the Force,” he said because knowledge was the only thing left he had to offer her, after everything.

She glared at him in contempt and forced him back.


	2. Chapter 2

“Hello, Master Ben, did you have a good week at school?” C-3PO asked as Ben skipped up the ramp onto the transporter. 

“Yea,” Ben replied, and for the first time since he started school, he said so without any reservations. “Are my parents home?”

“They are expected to be home by the time we arrive. Master Han came back home last night and Mistress Leia will be home after her last Senate meeting ends at 15:40 galactic standard time.” 

Ben hadn’t been this excited about anything C-3PO had said since, well, ever. He barely heard anything else the droid said as they made their way home. All he could think about was that in less than a standard hour, he would be showing his parents his great discovery. He imagined their reaction: surprise followed by excited pride as they rushed to marvel at his new power. 

The transporter barely landed before he jumped off the ramp and ran inside his home. “Mom, Dad—”

He stopped mid-sentence and recoiled when he heard a loud bang as a mug hit the top of the table, hard. 

“You promised!” his mother yelled, her free hand making an angry gesture as Ben stepped into the living room. “You promised me that you would go to this dinner six months ago!”

The enthusiasm Ben felt just minutes ago cooled immediately upon entering the room. It wasn’t the first time Ben heard his parents fight, but it was the first time he witnessed the fight in person. They always made an effort to stop fighting when he entered the room, but in the heat of the argument they hadn’t heard their son come home. 

His father rolled his eyes and snorted loudly. “Listen, sweetheart,” he said condescendingly as he put another bottle of Corellian wine into his pack. “If I had known back then that the Cloud Riders would be passing through within 2 parsecs from here I would have said something, but unlike you space wizards, I’m no oracle.”

His mother took a quick step toward his father and jabbed her finger hard into his chest. “Don’t you dare bring the Force into this. The Force didn’t make you break your promise!”

His father said nothing and swung the pack over his shoulder. 

His mother ran in front of him, her face read with fury, her arms outstretched. “Han Solo, if you dare to take one step out of the door right now, you will regret it!”

“I never forced you to marry a scoundrel, Princess,” his father said with narrowed eyes. 

Ben hated the cold, disparaging looks his parents were giving each other. He hated how their anger suffocated like smoke in a forest fire. He wanted them to stop yelling. He wanted them to stop fighting. He wanted his father to stay. He wanted his parents to  _ love  _ each other. He wanted—

The mug that his mother had slammed into the table earlier suddenly flew up and crashed onto the wall so hard it shattered. 

The adults jumped and turned toward the sound. 

“What just—”

“Did you throw that—”

“Stop!” Ben yelled at the top of his lungs. The fruit bowl followed the mug toward the same wall before falling onto the floor in a loud clatter, fruits spilling everywhere. “Stop fighting!”

His parents quieted. 

(It wasn’t the noise that caught Leia’s attention, but the fact that the last time she had felt the same intense frustration from someone, it was her father. 

Leia felt Han’s uneasiness, he didn’t know what to do. He had always held onto the hope that his son would take after him in Force insensitivity and that his life would not be shaped by a power he didn’t understand. In a way, she had hoped for this as well, ever since she felt that first swirl of darkness inside Ben. She tried not to let her own fear of their dark lineage triumph over her hope, but at the same time, she resisted Luke’s attempts to teach Ben about the Force when he was younger. 

When Luke told her Ben had run away to Snoke, Leia thought back to the shattered cup and the dented wall, and she wondered if she was a fool for trying to stop the unavoidable. She wondered if she had cursed her son to his fate with her blood.)

He had meant to float one of his toy spaceships in front of them when he came home. He had wanted to amaze them with his newfound power, but whatever he felt from his parents was not excitement or pride, nor was it anger from his breaking the mug, it was…

“Ben…”

But Ben couldn’t hear what his mother said. All he could hear was the drumming of his heart as his vision dimmed. 

“Ben!”

* * *

The familiar dark pit was in front of him again, his parents nowhere to be seen, except this time, the tendrils that haunted in the last few years were gone, replaced by a shadow (A ghost? A man?) in a dark cloak made of smoke. Ben instinctively wanted to run away, but his limbs were frozen in place. 

_ “You have nothing to fear, child,” _ the shadow said in a deep and surprisingly soothing voice.  _ “I merely want to talk.” _

The unseen force that kept him in place released him. Ben quickly took a step back. “Who are you?”

_ “A champion of truth,” _ replied the shadow.  _ “I will tell you what you even your own parents won’t.” _

Ben frowned. “What won’t my parents tell me?”

_ “How they really feel about your newly awakened powers.” _

It took a long moment before an image of a shattered mug flashed in his mind and memories rushed back to him like a wave during a winter storm. The last thing he saw on his mother’s face was…

_ “Fear,” _ the shadow said. 

“They wouldn’t fear a Jedi’s power,” Ben retorted. 

_ “They fear powers they don’t understand. They are worried you are cursed.”  _

The only time Ben ever heard of curses was in his mother’s stories. In those stories, the prince was cursed by a Sith Lord after a horrible deed. Ben had never met a Sith Lord, nor had he done anything bad enough to be cursed. It made no sense his parents would think he was cursed. “I don’t believe you,” he told the shadow bluntly. “I think you are lying.” 

The shadow laughed, the sound was so otherworldly, Ben felt the hair at the back of his neck stand up.  _ “In time, child, you will think differently.” _

* * *

“Did he tell you what happened that night?” It was the second time he asked the question because a weak, foolish part of him still wished to be understood.

“Yes,” replied the girl, so confident, so sure of the truth.

The shape of what she heard from Luke filtered into him through the bond. Luke told a cowardly lie, just as he suspected. Something inside of him spurred him to offer her the mercy Ben Solo wished he had gotten on that fateful night. “No,” he corrected her, and opened his mind to her so she could see the truth, “He sensed my power, as he sensed yours. And he feared it.”

* * *

Ben woke up to disjointed muffled voices.

“ _ … Strong in the force… darkness… training… in our bloodline… temple in the outer region…” _

_ “I don’t… too young…” _ Then there was a long pause, then there was the sound of chairs moving. 

“He’s awake.” 

The door opened a few moments later. His mother stepped in, followed by his uncle Luke. 

“I’m sorry about the mug, I didn’t mean to,” Ben said before she could say anything. The dream was still fresh in his mind and though he thought the shadow was wrong about his mother fearing him and he knew she wasn’t angry, he was less certain that she wasn’t disappointed because… Actually, Ben wasn’t entirely sure why, he just couldn’t shake the feeling. 

His mother sat down on the edge of his bed. “It’s alright, Ben,” his mother said, her hand cupping his cheek. 

Her words made Ben feel a little better but the nauseating feeling was still there. “I didn’t mean to,” Ben repeated. He took a deep breath to keep his voice from shaking. “It just happened.” 

“I know,” his mother assured, her voice steady. She pulled him into a hug and Ben felt his doubts ebb away. “It’s a good thing. You are strong in the Force, just like your Uncle Luke.” 

Ben caught the pause before she said “uncle,” but he was too relieved to dwell on the matter. He pulled back from the embrace. He turned his attention to Uncle Luke, who had been watching him with a smile the entire time. 

“Why is Uncle Luke here?” He liked Uncle Luke well enough, but he hadn’t seen him since his seventh birthday party and his mother hadn’t mentioned any planned visits.

“I heard that my favorite nephew just learned how to use the Force and decided to visit,” Uncle Luke replied with a cheeky grin. “I heard you can float objects now. Want to show me?”

(Luke never quite forgot the look of pure contentment and pride on Ben’s face when the boy made his toy X-wing fly with a wave of his hand. Years later, he sometimes used this memory in his meditation to calm himself when he suffered through another argument with his nephew about the Force and the merits of peace, serenity, and harmony. 

If only the memory surfaced when he felt the depth of his nephew’s darkness on that fateful night, then history might have taken a different path. But it didn’t—and in a moment of weakness he lit his lightsaber.)

* * *

“What’s this?”

In the wake of the war, war-time artifacts littered the school grounds waiting to be found. Ben walked over to where his classmates were crowding around A’Toba and took a peek at the piece of metal on the ground. 

“It’s a—”

“Maybe it’s a part of a Stormtrooper helmet,” Cassi spoke over him. 

Ben knew for a fact it wasn’t. He recognized the part, he had seen it on the diagrams of old Rebellion ships that his father kept in the garage. He spoke up, this was before he stopped bothering to insert himself into his classmates’ conversations. “No, it’s actually a stabilizing rod inside of the air intake of a—”

“Yes, that’s an antenna on a Stormtrooper helmet,” Kyle cut in, in that irritatingly authoritative, haughty voice that reminded Ben of every adult he disliked. Behind him, Gordor and Taskini, the two boys that had taken to following Kyle around and laughing and agreeing with everything he did, nodded. 

“Oooh, like an antenna back to the Death Star?” Maze cried in excitement, deciding that a Stormtrooper helmet was a much more interesting explanation than an air intake rod. Besides, Kyle was the smartest boy in the class, and if he said so, he must be right.

They were wrong, but Ben was resigned to the fact that more often than not, no one at school ever listened to him. He had decided to walk away when Cassi looked up at him. “What did you say it was again?”

Ben opened his mouth in surprise. He hadn’t expected Cassi to ask. Aside from the few visits Cassi had made to the library where she would interrupt his reading by holding his book hostage until he gave in to practice passing objects with the Force, they barely interacted. “It’s the stabilizing rod from an RZ-2 A-wing interceptor,” he told her finally, when he could finally form words. 

Cassi nodded and grinned. “I see. You know so much about starships.”

Ben felt warmth rushing up his neck and cheeks and couldn’t hold back a smile. 

Cassi gave another look at the rod before strolling away. Her attention soon shifted to the swing-set across the field (a stabilizing rod really wasn’t all that interesting). The rest of the group trailed behind her. 

Kyle shot Ben a covert glance as he passed, and Ben shuddered as he felt something he had never felt directed toward him before in his life:  _ animosity _ . 

* * *

The girl was glaring at him with the same heated animosity he had felt directed toward him countless times before. “Murderous snake!” 

He had to give her credit for the creative name calling, he had been called many things, but no one ever called him a murderous snake before. 

“You’re too late. You lost. I found Skywalker,” the girl said, so proud of herself, as if finding Luke Skywalker solved all the problems in the universe.

She was so young, so innocent. He pitied her for how little she knew. “Did he tell you what happened? That night I destroyed his temple, did he tell you why?”

* * *

Ben was fully dressed and packed at seven o’clock. He had been wide awake since five-thirty and had been too excited to fall back asleep. Today he turned eight, and his father promised him a ride in the Millennium Falcon when he turned eight. He had looked forward to this day with impatient desire ever since his father promised him the ride two months ago, when he had to cancel on their visit to the hangar because of work. The joy of anticipation made school bearable, even when Kyle picked on him, his classmates teased him for being weird, or when Kyle’s sidekicks “accidentally” knocked his books off his desk as they stalked past him to their seats. Nothing could sour his mood as long as his hopes and dreams could be fixed on that wondrous day when he could be sitting in the co-pilot seat next to his father flying around Chandrila. 

His father didn’t usually wake until nine on his rest days. His mother had left for the Empire Surrender Commemoration Celebration the night prior, promising to return after Ben’s adventure for a birthday celebration. Ben tried to distract himself with books and breakfast, but by eight-thirty, he couldn’t wait any longer and he decided to wake his father up. It was his birthday after all, surely his father wouldn’t be mad at him for waking him up an hour early. 

He knocked on his parents’ bedroom door. 

No response. 

He knocked harder and shouted. “Dad, guess what day it is?” He made sure his voice was loud enough for anyone to hear behind the door.

Silence. Not even a disgruntled grumble. 

He pushed at the door to find it unlocked. He stepped in. “Dad?” 

The bed and the refresher were empty. His father was nowhere to be seen. 

A dark voice in his head told him his father had forsaken him, but Ben forced the thought away. His father wouldn’t forget their trip. He said he was looking forward to it just yesterday. He promised. 

Ben trusted his father would come back from wherever he was soon. 

Ben waited. 

* * *

Kylo searched the scavenger’s mind, he saw how lonely she was, how much she wanted Han Solo to be the father she never had. 

He felt something he didn’t realize he was still capable of—something like  _ compassion _ —when an unwanted memory flashed across his mind: a pathetic boy waiting alone at the door on his eighth birthday as minutes turned into hours and day turned into night, until his mother found him hours later sobbing in a sad, inconsolable heap. 

Han Solo explained to the boy a few days later that a friend ran into trouble with an old acquaintance of his, as if that justified everything, and maybe it did to him, because Han Solo could never quite resist the call to adventure.

He told her the truth: “He would’ve disappointed you.”

* * *

“Can anyone tell me the answer to this question?” Master Theobold asked, pointing at the projected equation. 

Kyle, as usual, raised his hand quickly. “One hundred and seventeen,” he said with misplaced confidence. 

Master Theobold gave a thin smile. “Good try, but not quite. Anyone else?”

Exhausting volunteers after a few more wrong answers, the schoolmaster walked around the room looking for his next unlucky victim. His eyes quickly landed on a dark-haired boy, head down, scribbling on the datapad something that looked nothing like numbers and suspiciously like spaceships. “Care to tell me the answer, Ben?” 

Ben flinched at his name. He looked up to find Master Theobold with a glint in his eyes and a smirk on his angled face that left no doubt he enjoyed embarrassing unprepared students. Kyle looked back from a few rows up with gleeful anticipation. Ben knew Kyle would be thrilled beyond words if the schoolmaster sent him to detention for not paying attention in class. The only way to avoid the fate was if he could answer the question correctly. 

He glanced at the question in the projection and mentally sighed in relief when he found he knew the answer. C-3PO had taught him similar equations six months prior, thank the stars. “It’s two hundred and twenty-three,” he replied after some quick mental calculation. 

The schoolmaster regarded Ben with approving eyes. “Very good. Glad you were listening after all.” 

Kyle’s gaze shifted from bemusement to something that resembled the look of someone who had an itch that couldn’t be scratched. 

When school ended that day, Kyle and his two minions were waiting for him.

* * *

“I think it’s time you have a new name,” Snoke said on the eve of Ben Solo’s first assignment. The eve before his apprentice would stain his hands with someone else’s blood for the very first time. “A sentimental name like Ben Solo is not a suitable name for someone who will one day be the Master of the Knights of Ren.” 

Ben Solo couldn’t argue with this. Ben Solo was a pathetic child that wouldn’t stop wanting attention that he could never have, a vulnerable fool who kept caring for people who didn’t care for him, the constant failure who in trying to please everyone pleases no one. He would do anything to leave that weakling in the dustpan of the past, to become someone so strong no one could hurt him, someone so heartless he could no longer feel pain. Someone like…

A stray memory of spilled juice on his pants and dirt in his mouth while a blond boy with cruel eyes laughed came to mind. He hadn’t thought of his childhood tormentor for years, but memories often resurfaced at the strangest time. He remembered the moment when he finally beat that boy into submission, the satisfaction he felt when he saw the fear in Kyle’s eyes when the tormentor became the tormented. 

He pushed away the whisper echoing in his heart of the crippling guilt that followed. A ruthless monster would not feel guilt. 

“Kylo,” he told Snoke. He would add his old tormentor’s name to his own. He would be his own tormentor. “Call me Kylo Ren.”

* * *

Ben liked it best when he could play with Cassi by himself once she quit trying to steal his books. When she was tired of the usual make-believe games that she liked to play with Maze and Tarnia, or when she wanted to get away from Kyle’s bragging, or when she just wanted to spend time with someone who knew what the Force was, she sometimes arranged to meet up with Ben alone on top of a hill at the edge of school grounds. 

There was a beautiful spot adorned with wild flowers in the right season and the best view of the sun setting over the ocean the school could offer. The best thing about the spot was that there was never anyone else there, because the path was always blocked by boulders, but with the Force, Cassi and Ben managed to make just enough space to squeeze through. They found it accidentally when they were practicing, floating logs around in the woods. It was their secret spot. 

They sat on the ground after a long session of lifting fallen branches and passing rocks back and forth. Cassi was tired and called for a break. They were barely silent for a minute before Cassi filled the silence with a lengthy description of her home visit, the gifts her diplomat mother brought her, the festival that her father brought her to, and the games she played with her siblings. Ben usually enjoyed listening to her stories—Cassi’s home life was warm, and Mirialans had many different customs that he found interesting—but he found himself drifting. 

The stark contrast between his last home visit and hers was just too painfully obvious. His father had been away on a mission for the New Republic during his whole home visit; his mother had either been in meetings or in her office writing. The only words she said to him in the two days she was home were variations of, “Not now, Ben, I am busy,” as she kept her head down.

( _ “Your parents don’t love you,” _ the shadow told him. His voice echoed eerily through the darkness. 

Ben fiercely shook his head. “They do love me.”

_ “Do they?”  _ the shadow cocked his head and taunted.  _ “If they love you, why aren’t they here?”  _

“They are busy,” Ben rationalized through trembling lips. “They have important jobs.”

The shadow cackled. _ “Foolish child, that only means their jobs are more important to them than you are. You’re nothing to them.” _ )

Cassi stopped her chattering suddenly. “What’s wrong?” 

Blinking both eyes hard and looking blankly at the blue sky, Ben asked what had been churning in his mind for weeks, “If I were gone… do you think anyone would notice?”

Cassi was absently picking at the grass when he asked her the question. She paused for a moment, as if to ponder her answer, then she just chuckled. “What are you talking about? You’re the son of Princess Leia and General Han Solo, if you were gone the whole galaxy would notice.”

Ben shook his head, trying to untangle the mass of thoughts that crowded his mind, trying to make her understand. “I meant whether people will notice I was gone without someone else letting them know.” It hurt too much to voice his doubt about his parents noticing, so he didn’t.

Cassi bit her lower lip and hugged her bent legs. She was silent for a full minute, then she shrugged and said, “I don’t know about other people, but you’re the only one I know who can use the Force, so I think I wouldn’t have a choice but to notice.”

* * *

“… You… You’re afraid… that you will never be as strong as… Darth Vader!” the scavenger grunted out, something he had never told anyone in his life.

Kylo Ren staggered back like he was hit by lightning. 

This scavenger, this untrained girl… Did she just stop his mind probe and read his thoughts? Given, he didn’t expect her to fight back, he wasn’t trying to guard against her, but still… This girl was strong in the Force, perhaps as strong as him. 

He should be irritated, he should be angry, but all Kylo felt was kinship. 

He released the girl from his hold.


	3. Chapter 3

When they arrived at an imposing house that Ben had never been to before, there was already a sizeable number of important looking adults present, the kind his father would’ve described as preening peacocks. The house was much larger than his home, and the high ceiling and expensive artwork made the house look more like a museum than a home. He followed his mother to the end of the hall to a haughty looking couple. They wore so many large jewels on their person, Ben wondered if their necks were tired from the weight. 

“I am glad you can join us, Senator Organa,” the Senator condescended with a tepid, insincere smile. 

“Thank you for your invitation, Senator Locros,” his mother replied with more civility than Ben felt the man deserved.

The Senator’s wife tilted her head and looked down at him, donning an expression that suggested she was sniffing something unpleasant. Ben had decided he didn’t like her or her husband one bit. “I see you have brought your son.”

His mother squeezed his shoulder and pushed him forward. “Yes, this is my son Ben.” She turned to him with a meaningful smile and added. “Ben, say hello to Senator Locros and Missus Locros.” 

Ben met the woman’s gaze and reluctantly gave his greetings as instructed. 

“He attends Lumcet New Republic,” his mother added behind him. “I heard my son and your son are classmates.”

Missus Locros’s face softened at the mention of her son. “Are they?”

“Ben told me so much about him.”

Ben looked up at his mother in confusion and alarm. He didn’t know who she was referring to. He never mentioned anyone from his class to his mother except for Cassi, and Senator Locros and Missus Locros were obviously not Cassi’s parents. 

His mother pointedly ignored him. “Ben told me they play together sometimes,” she added all too smoothly.

The senator regarded Ben curiously. “Wonderful,” he said, his tone took on a considerably warmer and friendlier note. “I was worried Kyle would be bored to death today, but perhaps they can play together.” 

_ Kyle _ . Ben sucked in a sharp breath and took an involuntary step back. It was a horrible idea. “I do—”

But his mother silenced him with a hard squeeze on his shoulder. “Ben would love to.”

Ben pulled at his mother’s hand urgently until his mother had no choice but to acknowledge him. When the protocol droid was sent to search for Kyle, his mother excused them for a moment. “What is it, Ben?” she said, her annoyance showing the moment she was outside the Senator’s earshot. 

“I want to go home.”

“You promised me you would be good if I brought you,” she said with a sigh. She looked down at him with disappointment. “I need time to speak to a few more people before we can go. The time will pass in no time, Kyle will keep you company. You’ll have fun once—” 

“I won’t,” Ben told her bluntly. 

“Why not?” she demanded, exasperated. 

Ben never told his mother about what happened at school. His mother was always so popular with everyone. He didn’t know how to explain to her that the other kids didn’t like him, that Kyle  _ really _ didn’t like him, so he looked away and bit his lip hard enough so his tears wouldn’t come. 

His mother’s expression softened. She squatted down so she was at eye level with him. “I need you to try to be Kyle’s friend,” she pleaded and placed her hand on Ben’s cheek and made him look at her. “Senator Locros is a very important man, and I need him to like me. Please, Ben.”

“I…” She would be so disappointed if he said no and so happy if he said yes. If he did this for her, if he really tried to be friends with Kyle, would his mother love him more? Would that make his mother want to spend more time with him? “Okay, I’ll try.” 

His mother was all smiles when she brought him back to the Senator. As the adults chatted leisurely about children while they waited for Kyle, Ben tried to distract himself from his predicament by reciting facts about the ReConnaissance-170 Starfighter in his mind. His anxiety built with every passing minute. 

The adults made the introduction when Kyle arrived and he instantly saw Leia’s eagerness to please. 

He tested the boundaries by slapping Ben in the back, hard. When the adults laughed and Ben didn’t protest, he turned to Ben with the same detached amusement a rich, bored child had for a new toy he’d gotten but didn’t ask for.

“Yes, father,” he said and grabbed Ben roughly by his wrist. “We will get along very well, won’t we, Ben?” 

(Leia’s efforts to court Senator Locro’s favor would pay off when the slavery abolition bill she sponsored passed in the Senate a few weeks later, but the historical, far-reaching impact she envisioned would never materialize. The bill was continually watered down by subsequent bills introduced by opposing parties in the years that followed until it was no more than pretty words. 

The irony was the permanence of the shadow that her maneuvering would cast on her relationship with her son. 

Ben never let her forget what she did. “You are angry only because I will make you look bad,” he would say whenever he did something wrong. He would make snide comments about her willingness to use anyone as a pawn in her political games whenever they got into an argument. He knew it would shut her up, and it always did, because despite Leia’s usual eloquence with words, she never had a good comeback for this.) 

* * *

It started with an offhand comment from one schoolmaster to another just outside the staff room. Then, a passing younger student overheard the comment, and used it to defend himself when his older brother teased him about being scared of the dark. Then, the older brother told his girlfriend because he found it funny, who told her friend, who told his friend, and then suddenly the whole school knew:  _ Ben Solo, nine year old son of the most revered names in the Rebel Alliance, was too scared of the dark to sleep without a night light. _

Ben was mortified.

The kids were merciless; Kyle led the way, with mocking insults and relentless teasing continuing throughout the school year until it accumulated into one awful prank that had Ben locked up in a storage room, the lights turned off from the outside. His memories of exactly what happened after was fuzzy. One moment he was yelling and screaming, the next moment he was kneeling on the floor, staring up at a shocked Master Theobold with shaking hands. Everything that must have been on shelves in the storage room was strewn across the floor, the lights were shattered, there was a gaping hole in the wall where the door used to be. 

He was brought to the staff room, his parents were called (though only his mother picked up), and then he was told to sit on the chair just outside of the headmaster’s office and wait.

Headmaster Karthiar and his mother had been talking for what seemed like an eternity. He couldn’t hear their conversation behind the glass door, but every once in a while they would glance at his way, and whenever they did he could see  _ that _ expression on their face, the one that adults often had when they said they weren’t angry even though they were obviously upset.

He looked down at his bandaged hand, then at the grey carpet on the floor, and when he heard the glass door slide open, he looked back up.

“Come in, Ben,” the headmaster said.

The dread that Ben had kept suppressed while he waited suddenly flooded Ben’s stomach in a tight messy ball. He felt his heart beat out of his chest as he stood up and stepped toward the headmaster’s room. Ben wondered if he should have slip away when he had the chance, preferably somewhere no one could ever find him, but it was too late.

The glass door slid shut behind him. 

The headmaster gestured for him to sit down on the seat next to his mother. Master Theobold was there too, sitting behind them near the door, as if to make sure he wouldn’t escape.

The headmaster’s exasperated sigh cut through the thick tension in the air. “What do you have to say for yourself?” he asked a moment after Ben had settled down.

Ben kept his eyes on his shoes and shrugged.

“We need more than that. We’ve never seen a student destroy school property so thoroughly,” Master Theobold stated behind them.

“It was like that when I woke up,” Ben mumbled. It wasn’t a lie. He had no memories of what had happened, but his muscles were sore, and he couldn’t think of any explanation other than that he must have caused the destruction.

“I’ve already transferred funds to the school for the damage,” his mother spoke up, finally. She had the same even, unaffected expression he often saw on her when she was working.

“That’s not the point,” the headmaster said, loud enough to make Ben jump, but his mother remained unfazed. “I can barely make sense of what happened. I’m responsible for the safety of over two-hundred other students in this school and—”

“I’m not sure what you are insinuating, but my son is not a danger to other students,” his mother interrupted with her senator voice. 

“Can you really guarantee that, Senator Organa?”

He looked at his cut up hand, remembered what the shadow in his dream had drawled in his nightmares, and he couldn’t confidently denied the possibility that he might be a danger to everyone around him. Ben felt a little like throwing up. 

“There’s never been a documented case where an untrained Force-sensitive child has injured anyone outside of self-defence,” Leia replied with cold fury. “Are you implying that the school knew someone was provoking my son and took no actions?”

The headmaster sat back heavily on her chair. “Of course not.”

His mother who had pushed her chair back and stood up. “Let’s go, Ben,” she said, her stern voice left no room for argument. 

He had to nearly run to follow his mother’s brisk steps. His mother didn’t spare a look at him until they were outside, and when she did, it was a look of something between worry, anger, sadness, and weary disappointment.

“What happened?”

“My classmates locked me in the storage room. They turned off the light. I—” The lump at the back of his throat returned. “I panicked. I didn’t mean to.”

His mother looked at him like she could see through him. “But that’s not the only thing that upset you, is it?”

She kneeled down to his eye level and rubbed away the tear that had flown down his cheek without his permission. “I can’t read your mind, Ben, I’m not Luke. You have to tell me if something is bothering you.”

He didn’t want to disappoint her more with how much poorly he got along with everyone in his class, so he settled for the only thing he thought was safe: the nightmare. “I had a bad dream. The shadow told me I was cursed to be a monster and that you don’t love me—” 

His mother cut in with a sharp breath. An expression Ben recognized as apprehension flashed across her face. She suddenly stood up.

“Mom?” 

She took a deep breath. “You’re not cursed, you’re not a monster, you’re my son, and I love you,” she said, her eyes trained on his. He could feel her weariness, but to his relief, there was no anger or lies.

“It’s been a long day, so let’s get some ice cream on our way home.” 

When she smiled at him in the mid-afternoon sun, he smiled back.

(Later, behind closed doors, Leia and Han would argue over sending their son away to Luke in hushed voices for the first of many times.

Months later, inevitably, Ben happened to pass by the door on his way to the refresher during another fight and overheard everything. 

_ “You know exactly why your mother wants to send you away, young Solo, you know the truth,”  _ the Shadow taunted after, crowding around him.  _ “Say it.” _

Ben tried to look away but the shadow drew closer and tilted his face back toward his dark, empty eyes.  _ “Say it!” _ it demanded. 

In stories, sometimes curses were placed by malevolent spells, sometimes curses were laid by sins of one’s ancestors, and sometimes curses were just another name for times when fate dealt an innocent man a poor hand in life— 

An anguished sob poured out of this Ben Solo’s throat and he choked out: “I’m cursed.” 

—But in reality, there were no such things as evil witches or bloodline curses, only unfortunate happenings, poor choices, and lies people chose to believe out of self-preservation.

The tragic truth was this: Ben Solo believed himself to be cursed, and therefore, he was.)

* * *

“Let’s play a game,” Kyle said with a sardonic smile after class. 

Ben eyed him wearily, but because of his promise to his mother that he would try to get along, Ben humored him. “What game?”

“Fetch,” Kyle said.

Then, without warning, Gordor grabbed Ben’s school bag from behind and threw it into the fountain. The bag was a foot underwater before it even occurred to Ben that maybe he could have stopped it with the Force. 

“Come on, puppy, fetch,” Gordor goaded. 

Beside him, Taskini began to cackle and Kyle watched Ben with a cool, mildly amused expression, waiting to see what he would do. 

Anger, like hot balls of fire, coursed through Ben’s veins. His anger consumed any concerns he would otherwise have had for the datapad, books, and his half-completed assignments in his bag. Instead, he found himself glaring at the fountain with his hands in fists. He wasn’t entirely sure who he was mad at, Kyle and his “friends” for throwing his bag in the water, himself for giving them the opportunity and not being quick enough to stop this, or his mother for setting this all up to happen. 

_ Make them regret what they did _ , said a voice inside of him.  _ Slam them into the ground with the Force and make them beg for _ —

“Leave him alone!”

Ben turned to find Cassi running toward them, with Tarnia and Maze trailing far behind. She stopped in front of Gordor and pushed her furious face into him. “What did you do that for?”

Ben didn’t know if he was more pleased or embarrassed or something else entirely by the turn of events, but either way, his anger had drained out and he found himself frozen in place.

“Do-do what?” asked Gordor stuttered, taken aback by Cassi’s closeness. This made Taskini burst out in a new wave of laughter. 

Cassi jabbed her index finger hard into his chest. “You threw his bag into the water! You give him back his bag and apologize!”

Gordor looked completely flustered by the contact and almost looked like he might just do as Cassi ordered, but Kyle stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. 

“You are embarrassing yourself, Gordor. Cassi is just here to protect her boyfriend,” he said and turned his gaze squarely on Ben to remove any confusion as to who he meant. 

Ben was too dumbfounded to speak, but Cassi quickly spoke up. “He’s not—”

“Guess what I saw the other day?” 

Cassi crossed her arms indignantly. “Whatever you saw was probably lame.”

The smug glint in Kyle’s eyes made Ben weak with a sense of foreboding. Kyle turned to Tarnia and Maze, who finally caught up. “You know how we were wondering where Cassi disappeared to after class? It turns out she’s having secret dates with Ben.” 

Gordor and Taskini made loud ‘Oooo’ sounds while Tarnia and Maze gave up a scandalous gasp. Cassi shook her head frantically, looking like she was ready to dig a hole and hide in it. “I—it was—”

“Cassi and Ben sitting on a tree,” Taskini began singing and Gordor howled in laughter and joined in. “K-I-S—” Their song was broken by coughing because Cassi had thrown dirt in their face. 

“Shut up!” Cassi cried, her face beet red. “We never did that! We were just studying! We’re not even really friends!” 

* * *

Rey was shaking her head backing away from him. “Don’t do this, Ben. Please don’t go this way.” 

His heart pounded in blind panic. Every fiber of his being told him she was drifting away from him. “No, no. You’re still holding on! Let go!” But she was still backing away. She was going to leave him, after everything. “Do you want to know the truth about your parents?” he asked. It was a cruel question but it was the only card he had and he was not above using it. “Or have you always known? And you’ve just hidden it away? You know the truth.  _ Say it _ .”

Tears were flowing freely down her face when she spoke. “They were nobody.” 

“They were filthy drunk traders who sold you off for drinking money. They’re dead in a pauper’s grave in the Jakku desert,” he told her. She couldn’t just leave him just when she gave him a taste of what his life was missing. He was desperate. If he had to break her a little to make her stay, then so be it. “You have no place in this story. You came from nothing. You’re nothing.”

“But not to me,” he added, the one line his younger self would have given anything to hear from his classmates, from Luke, from his own parents. “Join me,” he begged, he offered his hand and whatever was left of his heart along with it, “Please.”

Rey lifted her hand—for a brief, foolish moment, he allowed himself to hope—then, she reached for the lightsaber. 

It felt like the universe was ending.

* * *

It took three tries and a few words that his mother always scolded his father about using before he managed to open his door. Ben stumbled in, slammed his door shut, and proceeded to dump everything out of his bag onto the floor along with what looked like half a liter of water. Everything was soaked. Ink ran so heavily on his idea book he could barely see the doodles he had drawn, the library book he had borrowed was so waterlogged he knew Librarian Lou would throw a fit when he returned them, and his mostly-finished assignments was in such a poor state he probably had to do everything all over again. 

Ben took shaky breaths before forcing himself to pick up the datapad. He pressed the on-button and it wouldn’t turn on. 

He slid down onto the floor and hugged his legs to his chest. His classmates didn’t seem to ever like him no matter what he did. They called him a nerve burner and a laserbrain and whatever other new names they gave him for the day, but he never fully understood why. 

And suddenly, Cassi’s words were echoing in his mind like a malfunctioning droid.  _ Not even really friends,  _ she said, her face was twisted in an expression he couldn’t fully decipher, perhaps a mix of embarrassment and pain and something like shame. 

If he was not her friend then what was he? Was he just some shameful secret to her? A last resort because no one else around her knew the Force? Did she hung out with him out of pity? 

And that was the last straw that broke the proverbial tauntau’s back.

An animalistic shriek bubbled out of Ben as rage blistered through his being. The knick knacks on his desk violently flew off his desk and scattered on the ground. Ben grabbed the datapad and smashed it onto the floor, over and over, until the metal dented and the glass shattered. He only let go when a shard sliced into his palm and a sharp pain shot up his arm.

* * *

Kylo Ren felt her in his father’s old ship, bright as the sun, shooting at his army, and suddenly he felt like he was that nine years old loser again, standing next to that terrible fountain, feeling stupid and humiliated for mistaking tolerance for something more. 

He knew his best course of action was to stick to his plan, he also knew she was just far enough that she could dodge whatever he threw at her, but because he hated himself for daring to hope, and because self-sabotage was his punishment of choice, he pointed at that kriffing ship in the sky instead and said, “Blow that piece of junk out of the sky.”

* * *

He didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until he opened his eyes to the familiar dark pool and the horrible shadow. 

_ “Silly child, seeking belonging in others that will never like you. If your own parents can’t love you, why would anyone else love you?” _ the shadow asked with cruel bluntless, affirming his darkest fears like he always did.

“You don’t know that,” Ben told him, trying to hold onto whatever hope was still within him. “Maybe if I can find out why, I can change and they will—”

“ _ You can’t escape a curse,”  _ the shadow told him with his usual cruel bluntness.  _ “Why do you think I’m here, child? You’re destined to become…” _

(In the recording, his mother rose to her feet and when she spoke, her voice didn’t waver. “Senator Casterfo’s accusation is true. My father was Darth Vader.”

Ben felt his heart stop. Darth Vader—the infamous monster from the war, the cruel servant of the Emperor, the enemy of his mother’s precious Rebels, the man who killed innocent younglings… was his grandfather.

“And that, young Ben Solo, is the shameful truth your mother kept from you,” Snoke drawled. “She recognized her own father in you and she was scared.”

Scared—Ben sucked in a breath because he couldn’t deny the truth of the words. He had felt his mother’s fear after a particularly bad nightmare or the aftermath of one of his infamous tantrums. He remembered the way his uncle shook his head when he struggled with one of those “easy” light side skills that came so easily to everyone else…

“You’re  _ nothing  _ to her now, but not to me. Join me, young Solo,” Snoke said, offering him a bony hand in the darkness, “You have so much of Vader in you, but where everyone else sees a curse, I only see potential.” 

If he had known earlier, before his parents abandoned him in his uncle’s Outer Rim camp, before he woke up to the bodies of Luke Skywalker’s students with no memories of what happened to any of them (he didn’t think he killed them… but more and more he was beginning to doubt himself, beginning to think maybe that was the reason why his uncle stood over him with a lightsaber drawn ready to kill him in his sleep), the truth would have devastated him. But as it was, like finding a long lost piece that completed an otherwise impossible puzzle, Ben only felt relief.

Because, finally, everything in his life made sense.

On the run for his life from his uncle, not on speaking terms with his father, lied to by omission about his own lineage by his mother, Ben was simply too tired to believe anything else, too tired of fighting against his own nature. If he was cursed to break his mother’s heart, if he was fated to destroy the world just like his grandfather, so be it.

In the darkness, Ben reached forward and took the monster’s hand.)

“Who?” It wasn’t the first time the shadow told him he was cursed, but it was the first time Ben let himself consider the possibility that it might be true. He couldn’t explain what it was about him that drove people away, but a curse might just explain everything.

_ “Your mother didn’t tell you?” _ the shadow asked, the jarring amusement in his voice made Ben’s blood boil.

“Tell me!” he demanded, if he was really cursed like those princes in his mother’s stories, he deserved to know what it was and how he could break the curse.

The shadow responded with a mocking snicker.

The darkness around the shadow surged forth toward him, but for the first time he was not afraid. Instead of fighting the dark tendrils like he always did, he let them overtake him. In the darkness, Ben could hear Kyle and his goons’ laughter mixing with the shadow’s. The blinding rage he felt moments before Cassi’s interruption earlier returned in force. His body moved out of instinct, he threw up his hand without knowing exactly what he could do, only that somehow he could shut the shadow up. 

For a moment, nothing happened, but then, the laughter suddenly silenced and the figure seized up. Ben watched the shadow struggled in wonder as warm satisfaction filled his belly. A laughter sounded, so cruel, and unhinged, and foreign, it took seconds before Ben realized it was bubbling out of his own lips.

The realization broke the headiness of power, and the wrongness of what was happening made him recoil like he was burned.

(On a distant, desert planet in the Outer Rim light years away, a girl was born to two unqualified parents.)


	4. Chapter 4

Ben’s tenth birthday landed on the tenth anniversary of the end of the Galactic Civil War, and, predictably, he could not compete with the New Republic.

Ben told himself it was probably for the better.

His mother would probably have insisted on throwing some sort of birthday party for him otherwise and the last thing he wanted was to be  _ that _ kid that hosts a birthday party that no one his own age showed up at. As such, he didn’t put up much of a fight when his mother said she would like him to attend the anniversary celebration. The tenth anniversary was a big deal, he was told. Though, Ben silently suspected, his attendance probably had more to do with the fact that he was the son of the war heroes Princess Leia and General Han Solo. He was keenly aware of how integral his parents were to the Galactic Civil War victory at a very young age.

How could he not? His family brought down the evil Empire and brought forth the New Republic. Strangers would walk up to his parents with reverence and asked to shake hands with them, sometimes they even asked for their signature.

The very important flag ceremony that would kick off the celebration was to start in about an hour and a half at 9:30 galaxy time. Ben had been lying awake on his bed since 7:00 because his parents had been bickering nonstop. His father hated formal events and he was purposefully dallying in retaliation, much to his mother’s ire.

He wished his parents would just stop yelling.

His mother banged on his door for the third time. “Ben, you have thirty minutes,” she told him.

Showering, brushing his teeth, and changing would only take fifteen minute tops. If it was really up to him, he would just lie in bed for another twenty minutes, but he could feel her rising frustration through the door, so for her sanity’s sake he rolled out of bed and told her he was up. 

He grabbed the formal clothes the droid had laid out for him on his desk and made his way to the refresher.

“For the Force’s sake, take that off! You are not wearing  _ that _ to the flag ceremony!”

“Your forwardness is making me blush, Princess. Our son is just in—”

“Han! Just put on that kriffing suit jacket!”

Ben groaned and slammed the door to the refresher closed as hard as he could. That caught his parents’ attention and they finally quieted.

When he joined his mother at the breakfast table fifteen minutes later, she was drinking caf in a long white dress that made her look extra princess like.

“You look so handsome in your suit, birthday boy,” his mother said with a smile.

Ben shrugged wordlessly and ate his egg.

His mother sighed. “I’m sorry I’m dragging you to the celebration on your birthday.”

“It’s fine,” Ben told her as nonchalantly as he could. It was just another day, he told himself. Really, what was so special about birthdays anyway? It wasn’t like he chose to be born on that day. It wasn’t like he chose to be born at all.

It  _ shouldn’t _ matter.

But his mother saw through him, as she always did, and when she leaned forward to fuss with his tie, she made him look at her. “It’s not fine, I’ll make it up to you next week.”

It shouldn’t matter, but it did.  _ It did. _

_ Does this mean you will stop thinking about sending me away?  _ But Ben couldn’t quite voice the question. Instead, he berated himself for that stupid lump at the back of his throat and turned back to his breakfast.

* * *

Ben grimaced and glanced at the label on the pudding cup. It said raspberry, but it tasted more like flu medicine. He sat the pudding cup down on his tray and put his head down in his arms. 

“...bring the game when you come over tomorrow…” A slap on the back. “As if I would forget. Just remember to tell Gared to bring...”

“...did you see his brother?” A squeal. “...stars, he was so cute!”

“...I finally read Court of Starlight, you were totally right...” A giggle. “Right? Cal is like the coolest character ever written in any stories…” 

“... are you going to Cassi’s birthday party next week?” A pause. “Isn’t the whole class going?”

He wasn’t. Cassi never invited him, in fact she hadn’t talked to him since that incident at the fountain. And it hurt. More than the scraped knee or bruised shin, because the exclusion made him feel completely alienated. Ben took a sharp breath and pushed his chair out with a loud squeak. He grabbed his tray, threw the contents in the trash bin, and left the food hall. 

He had made it to one of the sinks in the refresher room in the basement that no one, not even Kyle and his goons, ever seemed to go to, before he let the frustrated cry that he had kept in his lungs. He didn’t fully understand why he was cast out and the confusion only added to the agony. 

“Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry,” he muttered to himself, as he roughly rubbed his face, but the tears came anyway, they always did. 

He splashed cold water on his face until the tears stopped and absentmindedly looked at himself in the mirror. A long face with too-big ears, too-large mouth, and red puffy eyes looked back at him. He reached out to touch his reflection and snorted. He looked so pathetic, it was so embarrassing. 

He was almost glad he was alone.

* * *

“... I’ve never felt so alone,” the girl, Rey, as he had begun to call her in his mind, said in a devastated voice, face wet from tears. 

Memories he thought he had long forgotten surfaced in his mind and he felt his heart clenched. An overwhelming desire to comfort her overcame him, took him by surprise. “You’re not alone,” he told her instinctively before he could stop himself.

Her eyes instantly flickered up at him, and most likely a trick from the firelight, he thought he saw hope dancing in her eyes. 

“Neither are you,” she said, looking at him like she cared, like she actually gave a damn. “It isn’t too late.” She extended a shaking hand toward him.

His glove was off before he realized exactly what he was doing, and the next thing he knew, he was reaching for her too. 

When their fingers touched and he saw a glimpse of them standing together, side by side. 

The force picked up and swirled around them, feeling warmer and more inviting than it had ever felt to him, like finally,  _ finally _ , everything in the universe was right. 

For a short, fleeting instance, he allowed himself to forget they were enemies on two sides of a never ending war. 

* * *

Ben did a double take when he saw his father waving from the Millennium Falcon door. He hadn’t expected his father, in fact, it had been so long since his father last picked him up from school he couldn’t even remember exactly when that was. Ben had fantasized about his father surprising him with visits for years, but now that it actually happened, he found himself paradoxically unenthused. The last thing Ben wanted to do was talk about his week, but with his father as the pilot, Ben knew staying silent was out of the question.

Ben had just buckled up his seat belt when his father asked his first question.

“What’s wrong with your knee?”

Ben blanched. He scraped his knees when Gordor tripped him just as he made his way out of class. He had really hoped his father wouldn’t notice, but his trouser caught his scrape as he climbed on board and he couldn’t suppress a wince. “I fell.”

His father nodded, more thoughtful than Ben thought he was capable. He flipped a switch and the Falcon buzzed into life. “How was your week?”

“It was fine.” It wasn’t. He had a particularly bad week. Kyle had Taskini steal his towel and clothes when he used the refresher and he ended up getting a night of detention from Schoolmaster Theobold because he was caught stealing someone else’s towel in a rush to cover himself up.  _ A friendly prank _ , Kyle told him later. The incident left him so angry, he sent a class chair to the wall with the Force in pure rage, and earned himself another night of detention when he couldn’t explain how the chair leg cracked. 

His father looked at him for a long moment and sighed. “If someone is bothering you, you need to fight—”

“No one is bothering me.”

His father stayed thankfully silent, allowing Ben to finally relax and study the dials and controls in the cockpit. He watched his father touched the controls, and tried to deduce what he was doing based on everything he had learned from books. 

His father glanced at him. “Do you want to co-pilot?”

Ben sucked in a sharp breath, a smile finally broke out on his face. “I can?”

His father nodded at one of the buttons on his right. “Turn the autopilot on.”

Ben tried to remember the schematics for where the control was. “This one?”

“Yup. Now, put your hands on the throttle,” his father took his hand in his and placed it on top of the throttle. “And we are going to push gently…” 

They pushed the throttle forward together and the ship zoomed into the sky, up and up, until eventually, they were in space.

Ben had never been to space until then. The few times his father did follow through with his promise and took him flying, they had only flown on Chandrila, never exiting the atmosphere. The billion stars shining in the darkness of space took Ben’s breath away. “Mom won’t be happy if she knows we flew into space,” he whispered. 

His father smirked and winked. “Mom doesn’t need to know.”

Ben beamed. “Chandrila looks so small from here,” he observed as the blue-green planet grew smaller as they flew further away. 

“When you are a pilot, you’ll find that all planets are small in the big scheme of things.”

Ben let the words sink into him and felt a squeeze in his chest. He set his eyes at the slowly passing stars and asked a question that had been in his mind ever since he first heard his mother brought up sending him to Luke: “Dad, do you think I’ll actually become a pilot?”

His father looked almost surprised. “Of course you’ll be. You’re a natural.”

Ben sighed. “But Mom wants me to be a Jedi.”

His father turned to him and grabbed his slumped shoulders until he looked him in his eyes. “Listen to me, you get to be whatever you want to be. Your mother may think Jedi school is what’s best for you, but if you want to be a pilot, then you kriffing well will be a pilot. Just tell me that’s what you want and I’ll fight your mother until the end of time and enroll you in pilot school myself.”

Ben had, ever since his father disappointed him on his eighth birthday, resolved to not take anything his father said too seriously. He took his father’s promises as mere suggestions and allowed himself to be happily surprised each time his father actually carried through with his words. The alternative simply hurt too much. Yet, against such a solemn speech, Ben felt his conviction shaken. 

Ben allowed himself to believe his father one more time. 

“I want to be a pilot. I don’t want to go to Luke. I want to stay with you.”

* * *

(The dinner was unbearably silent until Leia broke the silence. “Your father and I have decided you will train with Uncle Luke at his Jedi academy.”

Ben didn’t look up from his steak as he processed the news. His hands tightened against his fork and knife until his knuckles were white. For a moment, Han readied himself for another tantrum.

But nothing happened. 

Ben just sat like a turned down droid, and in some ways the stillness made Han more uneasy than if he had punched a hole through the wall or threw plates on the floor. 

“Do you have any questions?” Leia prompted. When Ben said nothing she continued. “Luke will come pick you up in three days.”

Ben threw his utensils down on the table and stood up so quickly his chair almost fell backwards. He made his way across the dining room in the direction of his room, but his stopped abruptly and marched straight back toward him. “Did you really agree to this?” 

Han wondered how a look of mix of betrayal and hurt could hurt him more than a blaster wound. He didn’t need the Force to hear the unspoken words:_ Please, stop this_. 

Under the table, Leia squeezed his hand. She told him this was for the best, that this was the only way to save their son from following her father’s destructive footsteps. There’s too much darkness in him, she said, and Luke is the one who could help, and who was he to argue with her when she had the Force and he didn’t. “Uncle Luke will teach you how to control—” 

“I  _ don’t  _ want to be a Jedi!” his son cried with a shuddering breath. 

He had told Ben he would fight Leia until the end of time and keep him home on the Millennium Falcon just over a year ago. He had meant his words then, but how could he keep them when he saw his son’s power first-hand? It wasn’t just the power to smash dishes or fight a bully (he could do those things as an unruly teenager back in the days), it was the power of mass destruction. But it wasn’t the fear for the galaxy’s safety that finally convinced Han in the end, it was his fear that his son would one day hurt himself. 

“Listen to your mother,” Han said, and couldn't quite look at his son as the last of the hope drained out of his eyes. 

Ben stomped out.

This is the only way, he reminded himself. This is for his own good.)

* * *

Ben ran his tongue across his left cheek and tasted blood.

He must have accidentally bitten himself when he hit the ground. The hallway wasn’t completely empty when Harry first approached him, but as usual, the few students that were close enough to see what had happened turned away the moment he hit the locker. It was easier to just not get involved. Ben was almost glad. Better no one watch too closely. He pinched his right arm to stop himself from focusing on the wound in his mouth as he stood up.

Ben clenched his fists until his nails left red marks in his palm, he didn’t want to give Kyle satisfaction of a reaction. He made his way away, toward the stairs up to the food hall. 

“Be careful,” Taskini sneered. “We wouldn’t like to see the war heroes’ son trip again.”

A familiar, near uncontrollable pressure in his chest built, but the memory of a destroyed room months ago flooded his brain with fear so cold it could turn water into ice. If he could rip a leg off the wooden desk while he was asleep with the Force, what damage would he cause to soft flesh? If anyone so much as bled because of him, would his mother give up and send him away? Apprehension churned in his stomach, making him ill.  _ He is not a danger to other students _ , his mother had said, and he repeated the line in his mind like a mantra, and ran back to his room, where he threw himself on his bed and hit his mattress until his arms were tired and his brain felt sore.

It was the same dream as he always had with the cliff, the abyss, and the shadow, and he was resigned to suffering through listening to the shadow repeat his darkest fears and deepest insecurities until his inevitable fall into the darkness bring him thankfully back to reality.

But before the shadow could start telling Ben how his mother was giving up on him and sending him away and how his father no longer wanted to teach him to be a pilot before he found other people he would rather teach, a ball of light exploded out of the darkness, commanding instant attention. For a moment, Ben watched as it circled around him, leaving brilliant trails along the way. He almost reached out his free hand toward the light, but a gasp woke Ben from his stupor. The shadow was suddenly much closer than he was before.  _ Distraction _ . The prospect that the light might have been a distraction created by the shadow hit him like ice water.

He took a defensive step back, but the light suddenly sped up and headed straight toward him. Ben tensed and braced for pain… but it never came. Instead, the light felt warm and pleasant when it brushed against his skin to somewhere behind him, like rays shining through the windows in his home on a warm spring day. A touch, light like a feather, against the back of his ankle woke him from his daze. He looked down to find the smallest hand. An infant that he never seen, that definitely wasn’t there before, sat unsteadily next to his feet, the ball of light he saw moments earlier surrounded the child—a girl, he knew instinctively.

An irritating ring from far away made him look around. His eyes caught the shadow retreating, for the first time since he began appearing in his dreams. Could it be that the child wasn’t created by the shadow? That it wasn’t there to trick or hurt him? That she might even be an…  _ ally _ ? 

_ Who are you? _

But the moment of peace wasn’t meant to last. The ringing became louder and louder until he discerned it as his alarm. The light disappeared along with the girl, melted away until he could feel his bed on his back and the warmth of the sun on his cheeks.

_ A nightmare, a dream _ , Ben realized with a pang of disappointment.  _ The girl wasn’t real.  _

* * *

“The two were accompanied by a girl,” Lieutenant Mitaka said.

An image of an infant from a dream a lifetime ago, bright like sun ray, surfaced in Kylo’s mind.

He reached out and pulled Mitaka toward his hand.

“What girl?”

* * *

Ben found himself, as he often did, at the library, the only place where he could almost forget he was alone out of necessity and not by choice. He threw his bag down and pulled out his datapad. He meant to continue reading his book on X-wings, but his comlink burst into life at the moment. 

The librarian coughed purposefully, shot him a disapproving look, and pointed at the “comlink off” sign. Ben cringed and dashed into the closest private study room to take the call. 

“Ben?” his mother’s voice rang out from the other end in a tone he didn’t like. It was the increasingly familiar mix of anger and disappointment that always seemed to be in her voice when she spoke to him. “Schoolmaster Karthiar told me you’ve been late with your assignments again.”

Ben didn’t deny the fact. He hadn’t finished his short story writing assignment yet. The topic made him too angry to write. Though in truth, it was harder and harder to convince himself to work on any of his assignments. “I can’t finish it.” 

“You can’t or you won’t?” his mother said, her voice so exasperated he could visualize her shaking her head. “This is the fourth time this month.”

“I finished all the other assignments other than those four,” Ben said immediately. 

“You need to finish your assignment even if it’s not your favorite subject for the sake of your future.”

“How is making up a story about an outing with friends ever help—” 

“Ben!”

Ben quieted at his mother’s stop-talking-back-to-me voice. “You don’t understand.” 

“Just write something based on your own experience,” his mother suggested unhelpfully and Ben abruptly ended the call. 

_ What experience was he supposed to draw from?  _

The complink buzzed loudly again. Ben ignored it until it got on his nerves. 

“Ben Solo, don’t you dare to hang up on me again!” 

His mother was in her angry senator voice now. Ben glowered at the complink and stayed silent. 

“I know you are listening, Ben,” his mother continued. “You are finishing your assignment or else—”

“What? You will ground me? I don’t go anywhere anyway.” 

Silence on the other side of the line. His mother couldn’t even be bothered to deny what he said. Ben suddenly felt tired. 

“What is wrong, Ben?” his mother asked with lowered voice. Her anger had been replaced with genuine concern and his eyes began to blur. “Ben, I can feel you’re upset but you have to tell me why.”

“I just—I—” his mouth closed and open and closed again, trying but failing at finding the right combination of words, to make his mother understand just how out of place and lost he felt every day, how Kyle and his goons bullied him but he never fought back because he was scared of himself, how he was often just outside the door when she argued with Dad in angry whispers about his future without consulting him. There were so many things that were missing from his life: classmates that didn’t just tolerate his existence, parents that were present and put him first before the world, and, maybe, him actually  _ liking  _ himself.

_ Stars, he really wished he liked himself.  _

For a moment, Ben thought he would try to explain but then someone knocked on the other side of the line and told his mother the break was over and she was needed for Bill 27490.

“Thirty seconds!” his mother said to whoever was asking for her before she turned her attention back to him. “Sorry, Ben. I’ve got to go. This bill will keep young girls out of bad men’s hands. We will finish this conversation later."

Ben shrugged as nonchalantly as he could. He knew they would never finish this conversation, but it was nice to pretend.

"Love you.” 

It stung when the comlink went dead, and Ben, feeling too agitated to sit down or read, grabbed his bag and ran with no destination in mind. He ran and didn’t stop even when he passed the tree line at the back of the school grounds, and only stopped running when he was fully out of breath. When he finally made an effort to look around, he realized he was on the hill where he used to spend time with Cassi.

There was no sign of activity; the lone tree at the hilltop still stood, but tall wild grass had overtaken the clearing where they used to spar and the logs they floated laid unmoved from where they left them long ago, when he was still under the delusion that they were friends. 

The dam that kept whatever was building in his chest broke, the Force burst out of him in an uncontrolled blast, flattening the grass and wildflowers around him, picking up the three logs closest to him and throwing them ten feet away. He was shaking from exertion when it ended, exhausted, but at least he no longer felt like he was about to combust.

No matter what he did, he would always be different, and pathetic, and dangerous, because he could only ever be himself. 

He laid down on the flattened grass and glared at the grey, cloudy sky above until he could no longer distinguish the clouds through his tears. 

_ I can’t do this anymore.  _

He couldn’t, it hurt too much wanting to be someone different so badly. And because he couldn’t survive being so exposed, couldn’t risk another hit, the small optimistic voice that used to occasionally break through his pessimistic nature went silent. The callous shell of self-depreciation took hold. If he fully acknowledged the worst about himself, he couldn’t be hurt when someone inevitably threw it back in his face. 

“You’re so stupid,” he muttered to himself as a dry, humorless laugh escaped his lips. “No one can like a monster. Just get used to this.” 

* * *

Kylo Ren looked up and saw Rey looking down at him. 

There was no fear in her eyes like when she was in the interrogation chair, nor hatred like when they were fighting in the snow, nor tenderness like when they talked on that turbolift, the only thing that remained was steely coldness. 

She had given up on whatever misguided vision she saw. Sensible. Resolute.

Her jaws squared and she disappeared as abruptly as she came. A moment later, his father’s dices vanished from his hand along with the last wisp of Luke’s Force signature, leaving him alone in the darkness.

_ Let the past die, kill it if you have to.  _

The last of his tormentors was dead and the galaxy was in his hand, but now he was fully alone, like in those dark dreams of his childhood, except this time, he was alone in a perpetual nightmare of his own making.

It didn’t feel like winning, it felt like falling.

* * *

** _“The tragedy of life is in what dies inside a man while he lives.” Norman Cousins_ **


End file.
